I am making progress on the wool, on a knitting project I’d let drop for a while, and on some yard work.
The wool is taking top priority right now while the cool, relatively dry weather holds. Summers here are hot and humid, and since the house has no air conditioning, trying to work with lovely fine wool with sticky hands will yield a lot of small lumps in the roving and in the spun yarn. Generally, for three quarters of the year, working with wool is a very pleasant experience in this climate, but that last quarter is time that’s better spent doing something else that doesn’t include anything soft and fuzzy.
Practice makes improvement! My yarn is becoming much more even.
Two-ply skeins. These have not been washed yet, so they might change a bit when they are. These are, I believe, an improvement from the last two-ply skeins I’ve made. Still 420’s fleece! Finished up plying last night, and wound into skeins this morning before work.
Knitting can also be uncomfortable in the heat and humidity, so I’ve picked up my latest sock knitting project again—I think anyone who knits at all always has a small project like socks or mitts in progress. It’s the sort of thing that’s portable, usually doesn’t require a lot of thinking, and, now that it’s more socially acceptable these days, you can knit in public places without garnering stares and disapproving murmurs.
I had been more than halfway through this pair of socks, but after the last two pairs of socks I’d knit out of the same brand of wool began to felt—it is superwash wool and is not supposed to felt, but you’d be surprised at how often it happens anyway—and how they started to wear after only a few months, I decided that this will be the last pair knit from this brand of wool. They’ll also be knit with smaller needles so I get a more substantial, hard-wearing fabric. I’ve started washing all my hand knit socks in the sink now as there’s nothing so frustrating as spending time knitting a pair of socks, getting to wear them a handful of times, then discovering a pair of thick, stiff socks five sizes too small to get on your feet when you pull them out of the washer. I’m seriously thinking about knitting a pair out of non-superwash wool to see how they wear.
The left is the original, the right is the new and improved. 14 sts per needle on the left, 18 sts per needle on the right. The stitches look a bit wonky, but that’ll straighten itself out once they’re washed.
I’m not sure you can see the difference in stitch gauge here, but you sure can feel it. Left is the old sock, right is the new sock.
Yard work is happening! I stocked up on a couple of cans of permethrin to treat some clothes with so I could avoid getting bitten by ticks (I’d prefer not getting Lyme disease), got a couple of new bow saw blades, and pretty much went to town the last two weekends. The trees haven’t been managed in so many years that the undergrowth and tiny trees have pretty much taken over. Which is fine for a forest, but if there’s a house in the middle, you kind of want more airflow so the house (made of wood) doesn’t rot. Moss and mold love stagnant air and shade—it keeps in the moisture. So, I’ve been trimming dead branches where I can reach them, whacking down the hundreds of tiny conifers and some witch hazel, and trying to rake the leaves into some sort of organized piles so that I can try to grow grass where there once was grass.
Look what I found! A Red Trillium. I’m now almost thinking I might find a ladyslipper somewhere in the yard too – it’s the right kind of area for them.
I’m also busy splitting wood that was cut at the beginning of this past winter. Still not quite done with that.
This past weekend also involved ideas about sewing a shirt. Since I have a non-average shape, I cannot find button down shirts off the rack that really fit. If they fit my arms in length, the body is way too wide and the shoulders droop. If they fit my bosom, the shoulders are way too wide, and the armscyes are cut much too large (as if I had really giant upper arms). If it fits my torso length, it won’t fit my bosom or my hips. The solution to this problem is to just sew my own shirt, right?
I’ve been working on this for literally years. First, with no pattern drafting experience, I tried to draft my own pattern from scratch. This was followed by much frustration and throwing the pattern and resulting muslins in a corner for some unspecified amount of time in which I’d forget what I’d actually done to make me so frustrated. Then, I bought a couple of patterns, tried to alter them, make several muslins, got frustrated, threw it all in a corner. Months (or years) later, I’d try it all over again, sometimes trying to draft my own pattern, sometimes trying to alter an existing pattern, and sometimes trying to copy a shirt that actually did fit (there’s been only one). And then, I found the Granville Shirt Pattern.
The heavens sang with joy! I cut it out and, of course, tinkered with it. I had to learn to do a full bust adjustment and was delighted to discover that it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I’d thought—got it right on the first try! The sleeves of this pattern are longer than average to begin with, the hips just right, and only the shoulders needed some extra tweaking. I’d stopped tinkering just as I was about to add the shoulder tweaks to the muslin I’d made, and then something distracted me. My dressform adorned with said muslin stood quietly in the corner. Months passed.
Fall became winter. Winter became spring.
This past weekend, I decided to just make a damned shirt with no shoulder tweaks and no sleeve tweaks. Just the already incorporated FBA, and go. Man, I want a shirt that fits. (I actually can’t afford to buy clothes at the moment, but have a pile of fabric that I’ve been adding to over the years just for shirts I’d make someday.)
It turns out that even three months of intensive weaving, wool combing, spinning, and the odd bout of knitting, plus a full time job sitting in front of a computer and making phone calls does not actually burn calories in the way one hopes it might. (Especially if there is chocolate present.)
I got out some nice linen, ironed it up, got out all the pattern pieces, plucked all the pins out of the muslin, and tried it on just to make sure. And realized that that muslin is now one, possibly two sizes too small. Needless to say, the muslin was carefully put back on the dressform, and the whole project was shoved into a corner to be very pointedly ignored for a while.
Sigh.
So, the agenda for the next few months will include several bouts per week of walking, riding a bicycle, and perhaps lifting heavy things and putting them down again. If I’m feeling extra zippy, kayaking and running might happen, too. Which is also to say that some crafturgency will have to be moved slightly to one side. Well, exercise is, after all, good for you and improves quality of life. Also, I refuse to have to cut out another, larger size of the damned pattern.
I still plan on selling handmade things, but have not yet got my ducks in a row. In the meantime, the nearest goal post is getting as much wool processed and spun as possible before the humidity comes.
Crafturgency 